


Who Needs D'Artangan?

by th_esaurus



Category: Social Network (2010) RPF
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 11:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I will not apologise for my thighs,” Emma says loftily, threading her hands through Jesse and Andrew’s arms, pulling them close for warmth. “Or my kneecaps, or my ankles.”</p><p>“The Victorians would have burned you as a witch,” Andrew tells her cheerfully.</p><p>“I think you have your anachronisms crossed,” Jesse adds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Needs D'Artangan?

The weather forecast promises a week hot enough to fry eggs on car hoods, but Jesse suspects this, being southern England, may come with a caveat or two. Still, Emma decides she must go to the beach. She  _must_. The beach is calling her. She’s going to become a nun. Of the holy order of the goddamn beach.  
  
“We don’t do all that,” Andrew mutters from underneath his own arm. He’s weary and full of beer and the three of them are piled on the undersized double bed, watching  _Legally Blonde_  – Emma’s choice – and eating beef jerky she snuck through customs. Jesse nibbles on segments of a clementine, apparently the vegetarian alternative to cow. “We do—windbreakers and overcrowding.”  
  
“You’re an island,” Emma scoffs. She rolls over, her hair climbing across the range of Jesse’s knees, vivid as daisies. Her fingers smell of meat. It’s not as off-putting as it should be. “You’re imprisoned by beaches.”  
  
She sets the alarms on her and Andrew’s phones for eight in the morning, tells them she’ll make sandwiches and fruit salad when she gets up, then kicks them out of her stolen bedroom. It’s Andrew’s, of course, in Andrew’s place, but he kindly donated it to her for the week. He and Jesse are alternating the sofa and the floor. It’s Jesse turn for a night full of musty carpet and discovering what’s been left to rot in hidden corners at three AM. He always offers to take it, though. The sofa is nearer the bedroom.   
  
“I don’t have any trunks,” Jesse confides, once the light is low and the only noise a gentle electric hum from the kitchen.   
  
“No fear,” Andrew replies sleepily. “We’re not going to the beach. She’ll see the error of her ways.”  
  
(At three AM, when Jesse is trying to decide if the crumpled fragment of plastic under the coffee table is a deceased Mars or Snickers wrapper, Andrew gets up and goes to the bathroom. He doesn’t return to the sofa after. Opens the bedroom door and talks in low ciphers. He is still there when Jesse blinks asleep, and is back sprawled across the disheveled cushions in the morning.  
  
It’s not Jesse’s place to say anything at all.)  
  
*  
  
Emma, who is the antithesis of a morning person, nevertheless overcomes her zombieish state long enough to cajole Andrew and Jesse into Andrew’s ancient navy Mini, fumble for a road map, stab and grunt at a section of cobalt, before falling soundly asleep across the back seat.   
  
“Let’s just carry her back to bed,” Andrew says, gripping the steering wheel.  
  
“She’ll be mad if she wakes up fifty miles from the sea,” Jesse admits, making dogears of the map’s oversized corners.   
  
“She didn’t even make lunch,” Andrew mourns.   
  
Jesse drives. After the half year he spent chaperoning Andrew around America, he feels uncomfortably like a broken habit whenever he lets Andrew drive him. So Jesse drives, and Andrew navigates, and Emma snores softly in the back seat.  
  
It’s morning rush hour, a weekday in London and getting out into the open is as painfully infuriating as picking a fresh scab. Jesse is surprisingly level-headed on the road, rules and regulations, white lines and almost-familiar signage to tell him exactly what to do. He has a spark of panic when Andrew tells him to ignore the ominous red C painted in devil-red on every other road, because why would it be there if he’s meant to ignore it, that surely can’t be right; but it flares and passes as they crawl out of London, pressing east, puttering towards the rising sun.  
  
They stop at a rest station an hour and a half out, buy three coffees, one with soy milk. Jesse wakes Emma with gentle hands, and before she’s entirely shaken her sleep, he thoughtlessly reaches over and wipes the little pearl of spit gathered at one corner of her pink mouth. He dries his thumb on his jeans, and feels awful for a moment. “Coffee,” he mumbles.  
  
“Oh god, my hero,” Emma groans. She cradles the cup in both hands, sips at it like a chipmunk.  
  
Andrew smokes a cigarette out his open door while they wait, one boot perched on the gravel. They all peer up at the grim sky. The sun has, Jesse supposes, put in an appearance, but it’s pale and small and hungover, blanketed by thin, graying clouds that waft across the sky, unavoidably noticeable. “Welp,” Andrew says, crushing his cigarette butt underfoot.  
  
“Naysayer,” Emma snaps.  
  
“I said nothing. I said I’m super excited for all the swimming and sunbathing we’re going to do.”  
  
Emma sips her coffee. Jesse notices that she has a lopsided red bow poking up out the back of her blouse. It’ll be another twenty minutes before he realizes it’s her bikini strap.  
  
(Andrew demotes himself to the back seat and lets Emma doze with her head on the pillow of his thighs, stroking her hair. It’s so bright it makes his fingertips look pale. Jesse thinks about asking them to put their seatbelts on.  
  
He doesn’t.)  
  
*  
  
It’s not what Jesse would call a beach. A weary seaside town they’ve invaded at the wrong time, the waves kicking roughly at the promenade like a spoilt teenager, no sand in sight. The sky is overbearingly grey, gradating mournfully as it leans into the horizon.   
  
“All that sunbathing,” Andrew says, ironically chipper, as he hitches his satchel onto his shoulder and surveys the scene.  
  
Emma, whose face is always so young and open, her almond eyes her soul itself, looks kind of devastated. Andrew bites his lip and Jesse does too in empathy. He squeezes her hand, forgets and then remembers Andrew, steps away. “The tide’ll go out,” he says, digging up optimism for her. It’s buried rather deep. “And there’s always the—um—“  
  
“The pier,” Andrew chips in, “and food. Real British fish and chips. Rossi’s ice cream.”  
  
“Rossi’s?”  
  
Andrew puckers his lips and puts his fingers to them, splaying them out in front of him with an awful, hilarious kissing noise, the worst Italian stereotype. “The best,” he says, in a voice that sounds like a Mario brother.  
  
Emma seems appeased by his idiocy and the state of things, and offers Andrew the crook of her arm like he’s a lady, the other jutting out for Jesse. It takes him a split-second longer. Her blouse is silk, not synthetic, and feels like a cool night under his wrist. Over Emma’s head, Andrew grins at Jesse. It’s the first time since the early morning Andrew has given Jesse his undivided attention, and Jesse feels like his skin will burn and peel under the sudden brightness of it.   
  
The three of them march down the promenade, hapless musketeers with nothing to fight for and nothing to lose.  
  
*  
  
Andrew has a word that Jesse adores, and that word is  _naff_ , and that is exactly how he’d describe the pier. An outdated playground for pre-teens, tourists and drunks, there is a Waltzer that looks like it dismembers fingertips daily and smells faintly of vomit, a peeled-paint carousel with horses whose once-proud names have been scratched into oblivion, and a sad little casino that whistles off-key mockeries of snappy jingles. Emma loves it. Emma, who adores poodle skirts and retro-red toasters, loves it. They buy a handful of ride tickets with the shrapnel in their pockets, from a bored booth assistant younger than any of them, and Jesse guards their things while Emma and Andrew go on the Waltzer, twice, immediately.  
  
He can see their hands intertwined on the lap bar that’s barely holding them in, flashing on and off as they twirl; he loves me, he loves me not.  
  
On their second spin, Jesse loads himself up with their bags, Emma’s purse hanging comical and lily-pink from his shoulder, and feeds silver into one of the rusting claw-grabbers. He lucks out, gets an off-brand and off-colour Winnie the Pooh on his third try. Its maroon crop top reads  _Poe_. Jesse instantly panics that he has only one gift to split between two people, and wasted another four pounds striving for a lilac, flop-eared runt that he assumes is Piglet’s bastard cousin. He doesn’t manage it; runs out of change.  
  
Emma and Andrew are still holding hands when they leave the Waltzer, laughter and life and unsteady limbs. Jesse presents Emma with her prize, eyes down.  
  
“I shall call him Edgar,” she announces happily, her smile as wide as the crescent moon. She holds the bear under her arm so her left hand is free to make steeples with Jesse’s shy fingers. Jesse is still wearing Emma’s purse, and Andrew is wearing the shine of her lip-balm on his smile.  
  
(She excuses herself to the bathroom, some minutes later, and Andrew wipes his thumb across his mouth. So casually, he smears it onto Jesse’s bottom lip and Jesse tongues at it, unthinkingly. “Mango,” Andrew says, smiling like a blank book. Totally unreadable.)  
  
*  
  
And then, fickle fortunes, the sky yawns and the sun appears as round and bright as a cartoon in the mouth of the clouds. They walk out onto the jut of the pier and Emma’s face turns up like a sunflower, all her features a vivid smile. She runs out over the precarious slats, gaps wide enough to devour her whole, and she dances; she dances a naïve striptease, her cardigan coming off, and her shoes, and her abandon. Jesse wants to lift her like a ballerina, to save her bare toes from the suckling seaweed-slick deck. Andrew beats him to the punch, though, joins her in two steps and hoists her up with a little  _alley-oop!_ , more like a knight than a paranoid worrier. Jesse, instead, picks up her sandals and dangles them from one hand.   
  
“To the beach!” Emma calls, her arm tight around Andrew’s neck. He’s cradling her like a child, laughing at her flailing limbs, swimming in the air. “Come on, boys, I must fulfill my destiny!”  
  
(Andrew carries her the whole way back through the blaring pier. Jesse trails behind until he notices Emma reaching for him, her hands clasping for his. He jogs over, touches her fingers just briefly, and walks alongside them the rest of the way.)  
  
*  
  
The shore is sparklingly empty, the town tricked by the sun’s sleight of hand and the sand thick and wet from the just-receded tide. They have their pick of it, and Emma spreads her rolled-up Spongebob towel on a stretch in front of the quaint beach huts, locked up and waiting for summer to start in earnest, all of them rainbow colours that mix and match. She flings off her blouse and shimmies out of her trousers, and flops back on her towel, arms spread in worship. Her polka-dot bikini is clichéd enough to be endearing, and her pale stomach, flecked already with sand and freckles, seems barely more than the span of Jesse’s hand. He doesn’t test this theory.  
  
Andrew has a dented tobacco tin in his satchel, maybe half a century old, which contains a square emerald packet of Golden Virginia, and more than a pinch of weed he keeps in a stoppered glass vial, cork and all. He rolls just one, tight enough that it looks no different from a cigarette, though when he lights it, the smell is like a yelp, flagging up his illicit habits to all and sundry. It’s just gone midday, and there’s no one about at all.  
  
Emma fishes some money from her purse without getting up and sends Jesse out on a quest for ice cream. His flip flops pad like wet slaps on the stone sidewalk, and he finds a truck with its engine idling about three minutes down the way. There are scratched pictures stuck to its window of treats he doesn’t recognize, with names that sound like ninety-sixties kids’ magazines, Ninety Nine and The Screwball.   
  
This is Andrew’s childhood, Jesse thinks. The formative years of a well-adjusted young man, two parents to buy him everlasting gobstoppers and warn him not to swim out too far and find twigs to make a flag for his knee-high sandcastle. The sand here is different from east coast sand. It holds no memory for him, but Andrew keeps coming out with anecdotes from his past, visits as a tot that clung on through all the years. Jesse forgets, sometimes, that Andrew had a life before him, and will have a life after him too.   
  
Emma fits in there somewhere.  
  
He buys two cones, quiffs of ivory ice cream swirled on top and skewered through with a chocolate flake apiece. He gets a vanilla oyster for himself; not his first choice, but it’s in a wrapper he can shove in his pocket, untrusting of his lanky hands to carry too much at once.  
  
Andrew’s spliff is half-smoked when he returns, and Emma is on her knees, burying his ankles in the sand. “He’ll make a beautiful mermaid, won’t he?” she calls, beaming, and Andrew laughs, and Jesse laughs too, and, just out of habit, mentally clocks it as the first time he’s laughed that day.  
  
(Emma can only bury Andrew with one hand, half occupied with eating her melting cornetto, though Jesse chips in to make them a pair. Their artistic talent is little-to-none and the fish tail protruding from Andrew’s shins is lopsided and childish, cracked through with veins and arteries as the sand tickles and jolts Andrew’s toes.  
  
Emma’s ice cream dribbles down to her skin before she can catch it. Andrew leans over and licks a trail up that meandering map-line, starting at her wrist. She offers Jesse her thumb easily, putting it against his bottom lip to pick up the slack. Andrew’s spit is still shining on her palm.   
  
He balls up the sleeve of his shirt and wipes her clean.  
  
Andrew blows the last of his smoke out, head craned away from their faces, and crushes the remains of his roll-up in the wind-sifted sand.)  
  
*  
  
The boys leave Emma to crisp on the shoreline, some sixties vixen transposed into the curious postcard timelessness of the English seaside, and they take off their shoes and shirts, and they run into the water, sprawling spider-limbs and splashes like the waves are foaming at the mouth. Andrew, with his built-up bulk and his uninterrupted childhood, is a stronger swimmer, but he hangs back placidly for Jesse.  
  
Jesse needs reason in his life. Spontaneity terrifies him, the vast chaos of the world terrifies him. They aren’t swimming to anywhere, nor for any purpose, nor even racing, and Jesse isn’t well acquainted with doing things just for pleasure. This whole day has been so aimless, just the flare of Andrew and Emma’s personal brand of burning to keep him distracted as a moth, distracted from himself. And that’s okay, it’s been okay. But now his eyes keep bobbing underwater, and his lips taste of dinner table salt, and he can only see the back of Andrew’s head. His hair is usually so buoyant.   
  
Jesse slows to an unsteady halt. His body’s not used to this kind of strain: bike rides in the sunshine, sure, but this is cold water, sandpapery, all his arms and legs in motion. He floats to the surface, bobbed about by the rough current. And then Andrew is there beside him, happily swaying up and down in the water like a rubber duck in a bathtub. The bridge of his nose and the cusp of his cheekbones are pink as cherry stain. “Are you thinking?” he says.  
  
“That’s not a real question. Of course I am.”  
  
“Rephrase: are you overthinking?”  
  
“I—“  
  
“You always are,” Andrew says. The water out here isn’t a roar, just a slosh, deafening Jesse as it covers his ears and then granting him the gift of noise again just as easily. “Stop it.”  
  
“I can’t just—you know.”  
  
“I know. How about—when you see Emma, stop thinking. Like a trigger. Does that work? If you look at it like that?”  
  
“Maybe.”  
  
“She’s amazing, right?”  
  
Jesse swallows, and the brine in his throat doesn’t soothe as much as Andrew’s voice. “She’s your girlfriend.”  
  
Andrew grins. It’s not a real reply.  
  
(He puts his arm around Jesse’s shoulders, under his armpit, wrapped around him like a lifebelt. His skin is almost slimy from the water, pressed all along Jesse’s side, suddenly Siamese-twinned against him. They lie atop the water and kick their feet in time, all the way back to the shore.)  
  
*  
  
Emma is asleep, soft snores or heavy breathing. Andrew holds a shock of cold water between his cupped hands and a sly grins between his curved lips, but he seems to read Jesse’s face like a script, knows exactly what to do when he sees the sideward tilt of that mouth and the nerves shot through those eyes. He dumps the water on the sand instead of on Emma’s bare stomach, and watches for Jesse’s approving smile.  
  
The boys build Emma a make-shift fortress to shield her from the staring sun, since none of them trusted the weather enough to bring sunscreen. They drape their shirts over her belly and shoulders, make a little tent for her sleeping face by piling their shoes either side of her cheeks and topping it off with a paperback copy of James Joyce that Jesse brought with him.  _Portrait of the Artist_. He’s about half way and Emma’s warm breath keeps his page.  
  
Andrew and Jesse have never much gone in for small talk. They spent a whole shoot getting to know each other as deep life-lines in an old palm, swapping stories and mapping souls over late-night drives, beer, candles in a power cut, once. Jesse told Andrew everything awful about himself and his life, because he wanted Andrew to see him as a human being who deserved no love – for the role, for the movie, of course. Andrew told him after they wrapped that he made it so much harder.  
  
They never really shoot the shit. Every word Andrew says seems meaningful.  
  
“Emma liked you first,” he remarks.  
  
They’re sitting either side of her, Jesse’s face turned up to the sky, watching the clouds play games with the sun: moving when its back is turned, and seeming so still when it glares. Andrew’s fingers unconsciously massage the sand by Emma’s soft arm.  
  
“That’s the wonderful thing about words,” Jesse says, almost choked, looking down at nothing. “You can find so many meanings in them, and it’s never the right one.”  
  
“Emma liked you before she liked me,” Andrew carries on placidly, “And I liked you before I liked Emma.”  
  
“Now you’ve—you’ve taken all the fun out of it.”  
  
“We talk about you. Talk about buying a house and taking you out of that New York hipster dive and holding you hostage until you get Stockholm Syndrome.”  
  
“That’s not—“ Jesse swallows thickly. “That’s not quite the American Dream.”  
  
“We’ll bring your cats, too.” Andrew grins as wide as a galaxy. He leans over Emma and pulls Jesse in by the crook of his neck, their temples touching briefly. Jesse can see the steady rise and fall of Emma’s chest underneath them, the constellation of freckles around her navel where his t-shirt has fallen from her curves, like stars orbiting their centre of gravity. Not for the first time, Jesse thinks Andrew might kiss him. He always assumes he’s jumping to conclusions.  
  
“This book is gibberish,” Emma says abruptly, paper-muffled. Andrew’s palm slips down from Jesse’s neck and sets him free, though neither of them jerk back with any great haste.   
  
“It’s Joyce,” Jesse says, his only breathless explanation.  
  
“That’s no excuse,” Emma complains. She shifts, stretching all cat-like, but stays buried under Jesse’s book. The air is turning afternoon-chilled and the sun begins to sink, tiring of shining out for such a small crowd. Somewhere around the vast corner of the shore, a dog barks distantly, but none of them crane to see it.  
  
“Kiss me?” Emma asks somebody. “I haven’t had a kiss all day.” She peeks out from under her book, and her eyes are the colour of the tropics. Jesse knows because she’s looking straight at him. Andrew backs her up, her smile so easily expectant.  
  
“I don’t think I—“ Jesse stumbles.  
  
“Don’t think,” Andrew tells him again.  
  
“Andrew’s pretty dumb,” Emma says, too soft for the jab, “But he does come out with these pearls of wisdom every now and then, doesn’t he?”  
  
It’s pre-teen chaste, for all his nerves. Jesse only touches Emma with his lips, his hands clutching at air. Andrew puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him. He kisses the corner of her mouth first, mostly by accident, apologises, straightens up and kisses her again. Only the aftermath of her lip balm remains, her skin just, just starting to peel under his tentative kiss. His teeth touch her bottom lip and it feels like biting a clementine. He pulls back. That’s enough.   
  
On his way up to find the surface, Andrew catches his mouth in a quick peck, the shadow of a kiss, a congratulation or reassurance or just a long-postponed want.   
  
Emma’s close-lipped grin is pleased as punch.  
  
Jesse tries to find his breath while Andrew dives on their girl, play-fighting her in the sand, big wet kisses all over her face and fistfuls of sand and grit rubbed against her writhing, giggling body. Jesse clambers up unevenly. They need a moment, or maybe he does, or, something. He stands out by the sea. The waves paw at his toes, and he tries to remember how people breathe. In out; in, in out. Is that it?   
  
(Andrew doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, and Jesse appreciates that. He wouldn’t know how to answer. They just wait for him to rejoin them in his own good time.)  
  
*  
  
The sun gives up about five o’clock, and the air cools almost instantly, refrigerator-chilled. Emma doesn’t dress properly but drapes her blouse around her shoulders, walks down the promenade in sandals and bikini bottoms. An old couple, the first living things they’ve seen all afternoon, tut prudishly.  
  
“I will not apologise for my thighs,” Emma says loftily, threading her hands through Jesse and Andrew’s arms, pulling them close for warmth. “Or my kneecaps, or my ankles.”  
  
“The Victorians would have burned you as a witch,” Andrew tells her cheerfully.  
  
“I think you have your anachronisms crossed,” Jesse adds. He’s found his voice again, just.  
  
It’s too cold to sit outside but Andrew refuses to sully their seaside experience with inauthenticity. They pay in coins for chips and saveloys, carry them back to the sea wall and make camp on the creaking wooden steps of a beach hut named Ragdoll. It’s pained like a narrowboat, racing green and roses. Emma eats her hot chips like a rodent, nibbling with her teeth to keep from burning her tongue, and earns a sharp nudge from Andrew every time she calls them fries.  
  
They watch the dusk settle its velvet skirts over the skyline.  
  
Jesse doesn’t know what today has been. This isn’t the right setting for a sexual identity crisis, surely; quaint, quiet ghost towns that smell of salt and nostalgia, those aren’t for all these emotions. Nerves and fear and a little love. Hollywood would hate this story.   
  
“Wanna chip?” Andrew asks with his mouth full.  
  
“I’ve got my own.”  
  
“I’ll swap you your chip for mine,” Andrew offers stupidly.  
  
“Me too, I’m in this deal,” Emma chirrups.  
  
“I—Is this a trick.”  
  
Emma opens her mouth, undignified, and waits for Jesse to feed her, and Andrew does the same, his eyelashes fluttering, fondly mocking. Jesse’s fingers are coarse from salt and still shaky from everything else.  
  
He looks up to the rising moon to tell him what he should do; but the moon just silently thinks them all fools. So, smiling, he makes up his own damn mind.


End file.
